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Comcast Gets Hard Up At FCC Meeting
alphadogg notes a story over at portfolio.com claiming, and presenting evidence, that Comcast paid people off the street to take up room at yesterday's FCC hearing in Massachusetts. Comcast acknowledges that it paid people to hold places in line for its employees. But Save The Internet claims that people were bussed in by Comcast and then took up almost all available seats in the meeting room 90 minutes before the meeting opened, blocking scores of interested people from attending. Such tactics are not unheard of in Washington DC, but how appropriate are they in a regional meeting on a college campus?
What I want to know is how much one could get per hour as a professional "warm butt"--and what sort of requirements for participation there may or may not be. Are you contractually obligated to applaud, shout, and carry on? Or can you just sit and read a book?
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
It was touching when Bill the Wino, whom Comcast had been promised a fifth of vodka to fill a seat, entered a rare moment of lucidity and shouted, "I will not sell my soul for liquor anymore, net neutrality for all!"
One of the last things he did was have a 'community meeting' about property taxes, then let all his people in and fill the room before they opened the doors to the public.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Microsoft has been using the same tactic for the OOXML meetings (remember the incident in Sweden?) I guess manipulating public meetings is the next form of business competition.
Looks like the crack R&D team at Comcast has branched out and found a way to manage congestion at FCC filings too.
A black hole is where God divided by 0
Such tactics are not unheard of in Washington DC, but how appropriate are they in a regional meeting on a college campus?
Huh? I am all for thinking that this is dick move but to ask "how appropriate" it is seems a little ridiculous. It's a fucking college campus -- if anything, it shouldn't be permitted in "Washington, DC" (whatever that means) but if someone wants to fill a campus auditorium with highlighter toting narcoleptics, so be it.
All this shows is that Comcast is willing to play dirtier than ever to ensure that their network operates in the manner they deem necessary. Normally I couldn't care less what a private business does with its customers but when they have a permitted monopoly in as many areas as they do, they should be held accountable for the bullshit they have been pulling using pipes that my tax dollars helped fund.
It wasn't as much for blocking competition from other companies but from blocking the public from speaking out. There's gotta be some law against this kind of thing...
Oh wait...
It's always confirmation bias!
... about the people who accepted money to "attend" a meeting they knew nothing about? Pretty shitty ethics on both sides of this transaction.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
It almost seems like a move of desperation, I can't imagine why they would be that desperate though. Granted public opinion seems to be against what they are doing, but when has public opinion ever generated decent regulation from the FCC.
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask where they're goin' and hook up with 'em later.
For those who aren't aware, its common practice for Lobbyists to pay professional "line waiters" in Washington D.C.
Since lines form hours ahead of time for meetings and other public discussions, its a waste of time to force the lobbyist themselves to be waiting in line for 2-3 hours, so they pay someone to hold a place. I believe it was the Colbert Report that actually did a piece on this within the last couple of months. I think there was possibly some legislation being floated that would make some judgments on this practice.
It's Comcastic!
Frankly, someone should open an investigation as to how many hundreds or thousands of $$$$ of cash were paid. I'll bet Comcast doesn't have 1099s for the people they paid, which they probably illegally did with CASH...
Windows 3.1x calc: 3.11 - 3.10 = 0.00
Doesn't Massachusetts have some sort of a technology institute? Wouldn't the intellectuals at such an institute be excellent people to have weigh in on such a debate?
Also, I don't know about Y!, but Google, Apple, Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo all have branch offices in that area.
Comcast should be censured for it's behaviour but it's Amerika, if you've got money, it doesn't matter what you do. That's what's really wrong with America too.
Who got bribed? Are you replying to the right article?
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
With the rising unemployment in the US, Comcast could come to the rescue! Why don't they employ all the unemployed to 'reserve' spaces for their employees? What did they really hope to achieve with this blatant show of trickery?
My colleague and I run free wireless networks in housing projects. We both schlepped to attend this event and we were both turned away by Harvard cops because there was no room. It really drives me crazy that people whose livelihood is effected by net neutrality couldn't get in because comcast paid to pack the room.
The event was run by the Berkman Center and even people who identified themselves as working for Berkman were turned away. Even a reporter who just wanted to stand in the back and take photos was hassled by the cops - I didn't stay long enough to see if they let him in. There were a lot of people who arrived around the time I did (fifteen minutes early) and insisted that someone was holding their seat, so maybe there is some truth to the part about the people holding seats for Comcast employees - but - the Harvard cops wouldn't let these people by unless they called the person holding the seat and that person came out, so unless Comcast provided their employees with the cell numbers of the seat fillers they wouldn't have gotten in anyway.
I'm so mad about this that I want to tell everyone I know to cancel their comcast service, but because of the telecom duopoly most of the people I know who have comcast would probably have to pay a lot more to switch.
I'm a student at Harvard, and for what it's worth, I can confirm the Widener stretch of Massachusetts Ave was lined with an unusual (and infuriating) number of peter pan buses today (maybe 4-5 buses total). I had assumed it was a group of foreign tourists or a big alumni meeting (two busloads of said travelers are a common sight every month or so) but now that I know the truth, I'm fuming at the ears over this.
I'm contacting some friends in the Crimson to see if they plan to cover this in tomorrow's paper.
If the frat boys are showing up because they have an agenda or they are generally interested in a topic than thats fine. I wouldn't even have minded if Comcast employees had shown up en masse, but paying people who are going to sleep through the event is despicable since it prevents members of the public who have a legitimate interest in participating in government from attending.
I for one welcome our conference-room-encroaching net-neutrality-astroturfing chair-sleeping overlords.
Just a good thing Ballmer wasn't there, they wouldn't have been any chairs for THEM to sit on!
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
Ethics are a lost cause. Ethics and being unethical used to be a serious issue. Honesty and Ethics used to be the characteristic of a great person. These days, no one expects ethics, no one even values ethics. When the majority of people act ethically and honestly, there is negative feedback to unethical behavior. When the majority of people don't care about ethics, unethical behavior is the norm.
So much of a free society depends on ethics and the deal of ethics will be the death of freedom.
Do it again, but
(1) provide broad- and net-cast of the proceedings, and
(2) provide for text and voice reception to the panel for questions from the audience, local and remote, and
(3) provide a moderator whose job it is to see that the relevant questions are answered, or else specifically and overtly note that the relevant questions were non-answered with misdirection through irrelevant and worthless answers.
Announce that this is how it's going to run, and I'll give 10 to 1 that Comcast will refuse to participate. Announce that independent testing has confirmed they've lied about their "packet shaping" blockage of P2P traffic, and I'll raise it to 100 to 1.
Any day now one or another of these traffic blocking ISPs is going to blame participation in the goobermint's wire tapping program for the "unavoidable periodic slowdowns of certain types of traffic due to redirection of 'traffic of interest'" for analysis by the spooks. It's a lie that they all know will be recognized a such, but will be allowed to slip by the sheeple since it's for catching the terrorists who might want to blow up the Grand Canyon or some such.
NSA:
War Is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
We're Running a Little Behind
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
This is all part of Comcast's new Public Hearing Shaping technology.
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
Coming from a background in psychology, I can tell you things don't work out the way you'd expect.
The people Comcast brought in were paid to do something they won't feel good about themselves for. People don't like that feeling, and rationally, you'd expect them to get mad at the person who paid them, but the way this ACTUALLY works is that the people rationalize their misbehavior by siding with the people who paid them.
So Comcast just bought themselves a bunch of irrational supporters. You can guess that 20% of the people they bussed in who actually think about this ever again will be anti-Comcast. The rest who think about it will support them, in a subconscious effort to not make themselves a bad person.
A pity. I'd like your scenario a lot better.